1984 Is Complete

My 1984 set is now complete.

My 1981 set is now complete

My 1981 set is now complete. Special thanks to @tapintomac for a huge lot that really moved the needle and @A_Johnston66 for sending one of the last cards I needed to close it out.

Set totals: 11/45 (24%)
Total cards: 21,227/31,439 (68%)

Rhymes with spaghetti

This is my favorite card of the ‘82 lot I received from @toppsloader this week.

When I was a kid, I had three reasons to love Dave Righetti; he was a Yankee (duh), he was left handed (like me), and his name rhymes with spaghetti.

His ‘82 Topps rookie was a highly coveted missing piece of my collection, but our paths never crossed until now!

The 2000 set is in the books

Card #429 Randy Velarde marks the end of my 2000 Topps set.

The 2000 set was a fun one to put together. Simple, yet sharp design. Lots of early year cards for some mega stars like Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, and Mariano Rivera. Lots of late career cards for Hall of Fame players like Ripken, Gwynn and Boggs.

At just 479 cards it’s one of the shortest checklists of any Topps flagship set.

Current count:
6 of 45 sets completed (13%)
15,768 of 32,088 total cards (51%)

The official start to my 1980 set

With the 2020 baseball card season now underway, I’ll be focusing this year’s collecting on the 1980, 1990, 2000, 2010, and 2020 sets.

Over the summer I bought a few monster boxes of cards from a guy who pulled them out of an abandoned storage unit. The cards were all Topps baseball and football. The baseball cards ranged from 1952 to 1982 with the majority being from the late ’70s to very early ’80s.

This weekend I decided to go through and pull all the 1980 baseball to see what I had to work with for a set build. After an initial sort and purge of duplicates, I found that I had about 60% of the set to get me started. I was also pleased to find that star cards hadn’t been pillaged from the set by its previous owner.

Here are a few pics of my favorites from the start of my set build.

My first 1952 Topps is trashed, and I love it

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Despite its absolutely garbage condition, I got a kick out of pulling this card from a random lot of cards I bought today. Mostly cards from the mid-70s and early 80s, a few from the 1950s were sprinkled in.

John Antonelli is probably the best baseball player ever to come out of Rochester. He played 12 seasons in the Majors for the Braves, Giants, and Indians. He was a six time All-Star. He won the World Series in 1954 with the New York Giants, recording a win as the Game 2 starter and earning a save in the deciding Game 4.

After his playing days were done, he returned to Rochester and opened a chain of tire stores. If you’re from around here, there’s a pretty good chance you bought tires from Antonelli Tire at some point before the family got out of the business in 1994.

This is his 1952 Topps card. The company’s debut set that revolutionized the baseball card hobby as we know it today.

It’s the first 1952 Topps card I’ve ever owned. It’s completely trashed. And I like it.

1988 is in the books

I finished another set today as the last of my missing ’88s came in the mail.

That means I’ve now finished up the three sets I collected most during the height of my collecting days as a kid; 1987, 1988, and 1989 Topps.

My 1989 Topps set is now complete

Former All-Star and Fellow Alumn

Today’s batch of goodies by mail features Nyack College’s most noteworthy alumni athlete.

Andre Thornton played 14 years in the Majors for the Cubs, Expos and Indians. He was a two time All-Star, and won the Roberto Clemente award in 1979. He is a member of the Cleveland Indians Hall of Fame and formerly served on the board of trustees at Nyack, my alma mater.

This 1976 Topps card was his third baseball card, and the last to refer to him as “Andy.” It came in a lot of ’76 cards I recently traded for with a man from Kentucky.

I “pulled” a ‘95 Jeter today

I was rummaging around my local Goodwill today when I came across a ziplock baggie full of 1995 Topps cards for 99 cents. There were about 150 cards in the bag so I scooped it up. A real bargain at under a penny per card!

I was thumbing through the pile when I came across this. The 1995 set featured Derek Jeter’s third card in a Topps base set. I didn’t collect cards during Jeter’s career so this is the first Jeter card I’ve ever pulled, in a way.